Posts Tagged ‘liberal’

A month ago, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz sat down with the host of a Jewish television channel and could not name any reason for Jews to vote for Obama except for his support for abortion. Which is to say that the favorite muppet of the Democratic Party could not think of any reason to support B.O. except a mutual commitment that fewer Jews be born.

It is a little-known fact that Margaret Sanger, that pioneer of eugenic solutions to “racial, political, and social problems,” began by targeting Jews, opening her first center in Brownsville, Brooklyn, complete with Yiddish and Italian flyers, aiming for the two immigrant groups whose high reproduction rates were considered a social problem.

Abortion as a Liberal Jewish value has been a stunning success. In New York City, where Sanger first set up shop, 74 percent of all Jewish children are members of the traditionalist Orthodox religious group. Liberal Jews are already panicking over the prospect of a future Jewish population in New York City that is staunchly conservative and religious.

A recent survey of New York City Jews also shows a nearly even split between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. 46 percent of New York Jews are planning to vote against Obama, and a majority of New York City Jews think that Romney would be better at fixing the economy than B.O. But it is only to be expected that the group for whom abortion isn’t a Jewish value would come to outnumber the group for whom abortion is a Jewish value.

The problem with values is that you have to live with their consequences. When your values dictate that terrorists deserve all the protections of the civilian justice system, then you have to be ready to live with the explosions. If your values dictate minimal population growth, then you have to accept the consequences of extinction. Values that are contrary to survival carry their own natural cost. And when your values are at odds with your interests, then your values might as well be an open window, a loaded revolver or a dose of strychnine.

Liberal Jews like to talk about Jewish values rather than Jewish interests, because their values are incompatible with Jewish interests– even as a matter of simple survival. The usual liberal grab bag of values that are represented by the Jewish hand puppets of liberalism, like Wasserman-Schultz, aren’t just alien, they threaten the basic survival of the Jewish People.

When asked to justify what interests the Democratic Party and American Jews have in common, the Jewish liberal dives into a copy of the New York Times and comes up with illegal immigration, abortion, gay rights and support for peace in the Middle East.

That list of Liberal Jewish values not only fails to align with a single Jewish interest, but each of them threatens Jewish interests… that is if survival is to be considered a Jewish interest.

Peace in the Middle East means aborting Israel, dissecting it into small pieces and repeating the process until there is no country left. It’s another case of liberal Jews trying to do to Israel what they have already done to themselves. To believe that pressuring Israel into making a non-stop roll of concessions to Muslim terrorists is a Jewish value is to believe that suicide is a Jewish value.

Illegal immigration, a cause that virtually every major Jewish organization has signed on to, means the mass migration of Mexicans to the United States. The ADL’s own survey shows that nearly half of foreign-born Latinos rate as strongly Anti-Semitic, over three times the rate of white Americans. (Bad news for the glorious civil rights alliance; the ADL’s strongly antisemitic ratings are 12 percent for white Americans, 35 percent for African-Americans and 44 percent for foreign-born Latinos.) The only way to make sense of this is that Liberal Jewish groups believe that increasing Anti-Semitism in America is actually a Jewish value.

But liberals of all creeds need more Mexican illegal aliens and immigrants from all across the Third World to compensate for the good work of Sanger. Liberal Christians fear the reproduction rates of Conservative Christians as Liberal Jews fear the reproduction rates of Orthodox Jews. The only way out of the demographic race is to import “ringers” who will have the children that they won’t. The new eugenics is political eugenics. Birth control is no longer for the people that Sanger considered the “unfit”, they’re valued now for their reproductive rates which help the “fit” stay in power.

I don’t think I was the only American weirded out on Friday by the bizarre “dancing nurses” segment at the opening ceremony for the 2012 London Olympics. There were lots of children wriggling in hospital beds, and seemingly hundreds of nurses prancing around dressed in the garments of yesteryear. It wasn’t clear what the artist was trying to say – and then the letters “NHS” burst out in glittering lights on the field.

That position doesn’t hold up so well considering that 9/11 was commemorated at the opening ceremony of the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City. In 1996, at the Summer Games in Atlanta, the IOC had a moment of silence at the closing ceremony for the victims of the Olympic Park bombing.

In 2010, at the Winter Games in Vancouver, there was a moment of silence during the opening ceremony for Georgian athlete Nodar Kumartashvili, who had died in an accident on a practice run just before the games began.

So in recent years, the Olympic authorities have commemorated the death of an Olympic athlete and the deaths of others in terrorist attacks, with a moment of silence each time in an opening or closing ceremony. And guess what? Last night, in the Olympic stadium, the victims of the 7/7 terrorist bombings in the London subway in 2005 were commemorated as part of the opening ceremony. Granted, it was hard to catch; a photo montage was projected into the stadium during a lull in the prancing and acrobatics, but there was little narration to call it out. I didn’t even notice it, and had to be told about it afterward by others who had seen it.

It is jarring to think of passing references being made to the victims of terrorism, sort of as part of the entertainment, during an event-palooza dedicated to performance and revelry. The reason we usually have authorities solemnly asking for a moment of silence, at a carefully separated, showcased point in the proceedings, is that that’s what is appropriate for commemorating tragedy and sorrow.

But it was clearly important to the British planners to mention their dead from the 2005 terror attack in the opening ceremony. So they did it. For forty years, including this Olympics, no one has incorporated a commemoration of the 11 murdered Israeli athletes into an official Olympic ceremony. Yet Olympic authorities have been assiduous about commemorating others. Their relentless, determined failure to commemorate the Israelis in the same way is a failure to acknowledge the common humanity of Israeli Jews.

The opening ceremony for the 2012 Olympic Games couldn’t have been more stuffed with politics if it had been a bell pepper. The Republic of Taiwan was required to march as “Chinese Taipei,” although of course that is not what the Taiwanese call their nation. There is no nation of Palestine, yet athletes walked under a “Palestinian” flag and were announced as “Palestine.” The “quirky” performance segment of the ceremony involved numerous references to political events in the history of Great Britain, including, of course, the paroxysm of pagan worship, complete with cavorting women, for the National Health Service. It was a really, really political night; if a commemoration for the murdered Israeli athletes might have been “political,” that would only have guaranteed that it would fit right in.

Watching the ceremony last night, I had a profound sense of sadness for the hollow revelry. There was no dignified memorializing of the greatness, uniqueness, and courage of Britain’s past. There was “irreverent, idiosyncratic” entertainment, and a very long segment of writhing self-abasement before the shibboleth of socialized medicine.

We seemed to be looking last night at a moment frozen in time before a great upheaval, like the last days of lingering sunlight before World War I. A civilization based on entertainment and ritual political worship is headed for a fall. But then, a civilization that singles out some humans, like Israeli Jews, to show less care for – less solidarity with – is a weak and unsustainable one. Nothing else will go right with it.

Hussein Ibish is one of the more interesting Arab writers on regional affairs. In a piece published by the liberal site “Lebanon Now” he contemplates the broader meaning of the Libyan election. Although official results are not in yet it appears that the U.S.-backed National Forces Alliance led by the NATO-installed leader, Mahmoud Jibril, won a big victory.

In this light, Ibish critiques the idea that “assumes the inexorable rise of Islamist parties.” He is right and properly adds: “Libya shows that Islamists can be defeated in contemporary Arab elections, and this should be celebrated and emulated, not ignored or dismissed.”

Part of the problem, of course, is that the mass media and the analysts it generally features have so often—with almost monopolistic power—repeated that Islamists wouldn’t win or that it didn’t matter because they are really moderate. This has created a reaction among wiser people who warn the Islamists are winning and aren’t moderate.

Ibish doesn’t want the Islamists to win and stresses that they can be defeated. The question, of course, is how they can be defeated.

To begin with, seeing what happened in Libya reminds us that Islam is not some monolithic force that is inevitably radical or Islamist. Just because revolutionary Islamists can validly use quotations from the Koran and other Muslim holy books to justify their ideology doesn’t mean everyone will be convinced they are right.

Ibish quotes the columnist Charles Krauthammer as writing that what’s “taking place in the region is an Islamist ascendancy, likely to dominate Arab politics for a generation.” And Ibish responds:

“There is no doubt that Islamist parties will be major factors in the coming decades. But what Jibril’s victory demonstrates is that the `Islamist ascendancy’ is by no means assured or even likely.”

I think Islamist ascendancy is likely but not assured. That’s not because I believe Arab politics are “relatively homogenous,” far from it. The problem is the collapse of Arab nationalism coupled with the weakness of liberal reformist views, and the Islamist side’s relative coherence and organization.

Let’s briefly look at some countries:

–Bahrain, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia: Islamists have been defeated by force.

–Egypt: Islamists have a huge popular base. Yet some of their support came from a reaction against the Mubarak regime and the messy status of its opponents. Egypt does, however, have an institution—the military—able to contain the Islamists.

–Gaza Strip: Hamas won an election by a small margin then staged a coup. It benefitted greatly from the corruption and incompetence of its rival Fatah and the Palestinian Authority. I don’t think Gazans love Hamas but its armed power ensures that it will remain in power.

–Iraq: The country has lots of problems but an Islamist takeover isn’t one of them, though Islamists do seem to have huge power in the south.

–Syria: If the opposition wins the civil war, which seems increasingly likely, the Muslim Brotherhood has a good chance of gaining power. But the outcome is far from certain. Only 60 percent of the population—though almost all those backing the opposition—is Sunni Arab.

–Tunisia: The Islamists won the election but sixty percent voted for non-Islamist liberal parties. If moderates had only united they would have won. The coalition partners could restrain the Islamists.

–Turkey: Islamists win because they are patient, cautious, and camouflage themselves. Their opponents were in chaos and lacked leadership; the Islamists seized control of the nationalist card and were able to deliver (or just benefitted from) a good economy. Although they are trying to get such control over the institutions so as to stay in power forever, they could be voted out.

So, yes, not everything is going the Islamists’ way in a tidal wave. Still, they are setting the agenda and in every country where they have failed to seize state power they now constitute the main opposition grouping.

Back to Libya. Ibish accurately rejects the claim of some Western observers that Jibril’s alliance is itself essentially Islamist. I’d suggest Jibril’s approach is a traditionalism popular in Libya, a country sick of former dictator Muammar Qadhafi’s crazy experiments. The traditionalist factor—pious, socially conservative but not radical Islamist—should not be counted out anywhere. After all, it’s the main reason why the monarchies—including Morocco and Jordan as well as the Gulf Arab states—are surviving.

Yishai Fleisher, managing editor of JewishPress.com, appeared on L’Chaim, a show that has been running on ShalomTV for years. The segment appears on their new live channel, as well as on-demand.

Fleisher spoke with Rabbi Mark Golub about the fear preventing a strong, united Jewish future. He described the challenges the Jewish people face today and split them into three categories – delegitimization, division, and most importantly, fear. “Fear is everywhere,” he said. “[People] go silent when I talk about fear because they realize how much fear they live with…we need to be proud.” Fleisher wants to eliminate the fear, and in doing so, bring Jews home. He touched on many subjects during the interview ranging from the reasons behind the fear in the U.S. and the problems in the Middle East that induce it.

First, many American Jews fear that their own relationship with America will suffer if they move to Israel, or even develop a stronger connection with it than their own country. He revealed his desire to connect the American Jew with the Israeli Jew. Citing the Atlantic Ocean as one of the deepest physical boundaries between the two cultures, he said that he wants to make that border feel smaller. American Jews push their connection to Israel aside, due to a fear that choosing Israel makes them appear disloyal to the country they have lived in for years. “We’re culturally American, we watch Seinfeld, but the Jew always feels that at the end of the day, this is not his home,” he said. Fleisher’s determination is the reason he continues to appear on television and speak at college campuses and other communities throughout America. ”We have to put Israel first,” he said. “…We have to get together to build the Jewish state.”

Further, there is a duality among American Jews. They not only fear the Arab nation, but feel conflicted about how the Israelis treat them due to the negative media coverage. Fleisher pointed out that most American Jews are liberal. They’re liberal because they believe in the “intrinsic value of every human being.” He doesn’t sugarcoat it. There is a clear understanding that some liberties need to be abrogated in order for Jews to protect themselves. But what many American Jews don’t understand is that there is a mitzvah in place that sanctions such self-defense. It’s written in the Talmud that when someone intends to harm you, you have a responsibility to fight back. Jews want to live as a righteous community, but in order to do so they must survive first. It’s immoral for Israel to allow rockets to be amassed by people who will use them, Fleisher explained. “We are only 60 some odd years after the Holocaust,” he said. “It’s not a joke. Let’s not live in fear, let’s live in reality.”

Fleisher was born to Russian parents in Haifa, where he lived until age 8. His family moved to America for economic reasons. Although he went to Jewish schools, he craved more of a connection to Israel and couldn’t stay away for long. He skipped his senior year and at 17, went back to Israel to study in Yeshiva and serve in the army as a paratrooper. After an injury, Fleisher returned to America to study at Yeshiva University and obtain a post-graduate degree at Cardozo Law School. There, he met his wife Malkah. The two moved to Israel to get married and establish their home. In the interview, Fleisher didn’t deny that there’s an atmosphere of tension in Israel and that they have to be vigilant, but living in Israel and raising a family there is something he never questions.

Fleisher emphasized that at the end of the day Israel is the homeland of the Jews. Residents can be critical of the nation’s politics and of the current state of warfare, but they should do it without fear and argue about it in their own nation. There are many enticing countries out there, Fleisher said, but Israel needs to be number one.

The last time Aaron Sorkin had a high-profile political television show, liberals used it to cope with the decline and fall of the Clinton Presidency and the long winter of the Bush Years. The West Wing was a coping mechanism for the death of a liberal dream, and so is The Newsroom. Both are an escape into fantasy to avoid dealing with the harsh reality.

On an episode of Seinfeld, George is stung by an insult but is unable to think of a retort, so he spends days trying to come up with the perfect comeback, until he finally thinks of it and travels around the country to get the chance to deliver it. The Newsroom, set in the past, and jumping in right before the political balance tilted toward the Republicans in the mid-term elections, is the same thing.

The Newsroom is Sorkin’s sad attempt to win an argument by rewriting history and coming up with all the comebacks that his side couldn’t think of two years ago. It’s the sad and pathetic spectacle of an ideology creating its own fantasy version of its reality in which it won the argument.

Unlike The West Wing, The Newsroom isn’t set in an alternate world in which the universe innately favors liberals. Instead it’s set in an alternate version of the past, in which liberals were smarter and won all the arguments that they ended up losing here. And the existence of The Newsroom is the greatest possible concession that the argument was lost.

There’s no reason for Republicans to look down on The Newsroom. It’s a safer outlet for liberal anger than Occupy Wall Street. It’s a miniature universe in which they are smarter, nobler and better than everyone else. Children have fantasy worlds like that. There’s no reason that liberals shouldn’t. Not only does it give them the security of believing that they really were superior, but it prevents them from learning any useful lessons from their defeat.

It’s never a bad thing when your enemies escape into a delusional state, to a world of their making in which they are in complete control of everything. It makes it more likely that they will cede at least some control over the real world. And it’s not only an admission of defeat, but of emotional and mental fragility. Adults don’t need to build fantasy worlds to escape the effects of their failures on their precious self-esteem. That’s for overgrown children who are used to getting trophies for just showing up.

The Newsroom is the kid that everyone hated losing his race for class president and creating a fantasy world in which he won the election and everyone cheered his obnoxious tantrums. It may not be good for him, but it’s good for us because it means he hasn’t learned to win. All that he’s learned to do is manage the emotional experience of defeat through delusional tantrums of superiority.

Propaganda that tells you that you won, when you actually lost, is corrosive; it inhibits any serious self-evaluation. And without some soul-searching and error-checking, the same mistakes are bound to be repeated over and over again. Seventeen years after the Clinton Presidency was nearly torpedoed by universal health care, his party’s successor, who defeated the woman who shaped the initiative, went down the same road, but with much less caution.

That kind of stupidity would not have been possible if the winners had learned any lessons from the past. But the winners had been living on The West Wing, in which liberal speeches and principles are all it takes to win. Where the good guys never lose, because the scripts are written that way. Rather than living in the real Clinton Years, many of them had been living in the imaginary version. Now, rather than remembering the actual Obama Years, they will remember The Newsroom‘s fictional version of them. And they will make the same mistakes all over again.

HBO, which has invested big in liberal propaganda, knows exactly what it’s doing. At a time when customers are dropping cable, particularly the high-priced packages, it is insulating itself with a built-in audience. Forget MSNBC or Comedy Central with their tantrums against real-life Republicans, on HBO, liberal audiences can go on safe safaris to see experienced liberal great hunters taking potshots at imaginary Republicans.

A good portion of the reliably liberal mainstream media had soured on Barack Obama once his historic 2008 ascension to the presidency gave way to a mostly lackluster performance when he actually moved into the White House.

But with the 2012 presidential election just over five months away, liberal journalists are showing every sign of awakening from their three-year stupor, going all out to discredit Mitt Romney – even to the point of dredging up a nearly 50-year-old high school incident – while loudly decrying a proposed ad campaign by conservative operatives to remind citizens of Obama’s longtime ties to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

If it seems like you’ve seen this movie before it’s because the media ran similar interference for Obama in 2008 when Wright’s invective-laden anti-U.S. and anti-Israel sermons became public knowledge and candidate Obama cast about for a credible explanation as to why he was Wright’s longtime parishioner and why he apparently held the cleric in such high esteem that the Obamas had him preside at their wedding and baptize their children.

Once the mainstream media – finally, belatedly, after stories of Wright’s racist, anti-American worldview had been circulating for at least a year and only when videos showing Wright in all his vicious glory began to surface on the Internet – were forced to confront the possibility that the Illinois messiah might have some serious explaining to do, Obama realized his disclaimers and rationalizations concerning Wright weren’t enough.

Obama now desperately needed to convincingly distance himself from the Afrocentric radical who’d bestowed an award on Louis Farrakhan and whom Obama had, only weeks earlier, likened to a beloved “old uncle.”

As the liberal writer Gerald Posner acknowledged, Obama’s prevarications just didn’t ring true and were rife with internal contradictions.

“If the parishioners of Trinity United Church were not buzzing about Reverend Wright’s post-9/11 comments,” Posner wrote, “then it could only seem to be because those comments were not out of character with what he preached from the pulpit many times before. In that case, I have to wonder if it is really possible for the Obamas to have been parishioners there…and not to have known very clearly how radical Wright’s views were. If, on the other hand, parishioners were shocked by Wright’s vitriol only days after more than 3,000 Americans had been killed by terrorists, they would have talked about it incessantly. Barack – a sitting Illinois state senator – would have been one of the first to hear about it.”

So Obama gave a flowery speech on race relations in America, and did anyone doubt the media would swoon over whatever came out of his mouth? Liberals had too much invested in the storyline of a post-racial, biracial healer whose mission it was to set our national house in order after the unspeakable depredations of the George W. Bush years.

Hearts racing, pundits and editorial writers competed with each other in the prostration sweepstakes. (Lost in all the sticky-sweet commentary was the stark fact that Obama only gave the speech because his previous equivocations would wash no more. Obama’s ability to deliver a sweet speech was never in doubt; his judgment and honesty were, and on those counts he hardly acquitted himself with honor.)

“An extraordinary moment of truth-telling,” gasped the Washington Post. “One of the most impressive presidential candidates in years,” cheered political science professor Alan Wolfe in The New Republic.

“Perhaps the most thoughtful and sophisticated oration on race ever delivered by an American politician,” marveled New York Observer reporter Steve Kornacki.

The following statement from Lawrence O’Donnell is being widely circulated on the Internet. I’m sure that most of those who read it think these are self-evident truths about history proving that Republicans and conservatives are so obviously evil that the issue is beyond reasonable debate. Such credulity in the face of the current hegemonic narrative is an accurate sign of how American history has been taught to the current generation. It also shows us why we hear the equivalent of “the science is settled” on the difference between the two currently competing views of America.

“What did liberals do that was so offensive to the Republican Party? I’ll tell you what they did. Liberals got women the right to vote. Liberals got African-Americans the right to vote. Liberals created Social Security and lifted millions of elderly people out of poverty. Liberals ended segregation. Liberals passed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act. Liberals created Medicare. Liberals passed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act. What did Conservatives do? They opposed them on every one of those things, every one. So when you try to hurl that label at my feet, ‘Liberal,’ as if it were something to be ashamed of, something dirty, something to run away from, it won’t work, because I will pick up that label and I will wear it as a badge of honor.”

This statement is well worth analyzing. Begin by noting that while this is supposedly a pro-liberal statement it is actually intended as a pro-Democratic Party statement. The message is by the “Anti-Republican Crusaders” directed explicitly against Republicans. The conflation of the accomplishments listed and the word liberal, on the one hand, and the presentation of Democratic Party as one creates considerable problems for his historical narrative.

As a side remark, I thought the word “Crusaders” was not PC. Weren’t the Crusaders supposedly aggressive, cruel bigots? What will O’Donnell’s radical Islamist allies think of this usage?

In addition, either O’Donnell doesn’t know much about American history or he thinks the American people don’t. Probably both parts of that statement are true.

I am still a registered Democrat but I’m also someone who tries to be an honest historian. The following analysis is academic – in the old sense of the word – and as balanced as I can make it.

O’Donnell’s list is the dominant narrative in America today. You will find it promoted in every mass media outlet and taught as the only possible interpretation of U.S. history in schools. How accurate is it? Well, that’s the third question that should be asked. The first two are:

–Why is it that Obama and the current radicals-pretending-to be liberals have to run on an old historical record rather than their own record in office and the current anti-liberal ideas they propound?

–Why is it that we should assume that the situation faced by America today is the same as it was in 1913 or 1933 or 1964? Perhaps more government and regulation was needed in those years but since we have had decades of more and more of these things isn’t it possible that we’ve had enough, in fact, far more than enough?

These are two questions most of the American people never see.

Let’s go through O’Donnell’s list:

–Liberals got women the right to vote. Of course, the main credit belongs to the women’s suffrage movement. But which ardent supporter of that movement first introduced the nineteenth amendment in Congress? Senator Aaron Sargent who was a—wait for it—Republican from California and a conservative. The legislatures of most of the state passing the amendment were also dominated by Republicans. This was not primarily a partisan or wider ideological issue at the time because many people held views which, in today’s context, would be considered quite contradictory.

–Liberals got African-Americans the right to vote. That seem obvious but hold on and let’s look at the facts. The main opponents of civil rights were not Republicans but Southern Democrats. And since the Democratic party put its own interests above racial justice the party held back for many decades on this issue. President Woodrow Wilson was a particularly nasty racist. Most politically active African-Americans were Republicans. Only at the last moment did President Lyndon Johnson really turn around the Democratic Party and it changed course. Yet such people as Al Gore’s father and the powerful ex-Klan leader Robert Byrd continued to oppose civil rights. Liberals and Democrats deserve credit for what they did but they did far less than they claim.

I also seem to recall Abraham Lincoln freeing the slaves and Republicans creating Reconstruction while the Democrats were the party of secession, surrender to the Confederacy, the Ku Klux Klan, and Jim Crow.

Note carefully something very revealing here. Liberals “got” women and African-Americans the right to vote. I thought there were powerful grassroots’ movements that forced these changes on the Washington power brokers! Yet O’Donnell accurately reflects the profoundly patronizing attitude of today’s leftist elite toward the little people. Funny, isn’t it? A real liberal or even a historical leftist would stress the role played by the average people who courageously grouped together to bring change. This is one more indication of the isolation of the current political-intellectual ruling elite (which in many ways is profoundly reactionary) from the liberals of the past. According to O’Donnell–and none of the admirers of his statement see the incongruity here!–the white, male establishment of the 1920s and 1960s, respectively, gave out these gifts to dependent people the way that government “gives” rights today. Thank you, master!